It might be that you’ve reached a point in your life where you find yourself radically reconsidering the direction you’re taking with your career. Maybe you just have a vague sense that your true passion lies elsewhere, and maybe you are so viscerally fed up with your current career that you’re chomping at the bit to escape.
If and when this feeling settles upon you, however, it’s generally a bad idea to drop whatever you’re doing and sprint to your bosses office with resignation letter in hand. Unless you’ve saved up sufficiently and have decent options lined up already, starting to test the waters while still at your day job is by far the wiser course of action.
Here are some ways to start exploring new territory while still working full time.
Begin blogging
There is no shortage of blogs out there, on any number of different topics you could imagine, and for good reason. Blogs are an excellent medium for self-expression. They are a great way to explore a subject or field of professional interest to you, or your readers, and they’re a great way of beginning to earn some money on the side.
A blog might be a business in itself, the kind of place that gets people thinking: I need to find an SEO agency near me so I can earn a living like this from my site, too.
But even if your blog doesn’t end up becoming your “new job”, it’s still likely to end up being a worthwhile investment of time and energy, for the things it can teach you, if nothing else.
A blog is a tool for your own ability to think as well as anything else. By planning, researching, and writing posts, and exploring topics of interest to you, you may well stumble upon a future career path by accident.
Consider low-financial-investment forms of entrepreneurship
When people think of the prospect of becoming entrepreneurs, their minds typically wander to visions of people in expensive suits, sitting in the upper floors of plush corporate buildings.
Or, if their imaginations are more true to the reality of the beginner-entrepreneur, they might visualise someone whose home is stacked with boxes of merchandise and order forms.
Fortunately, there are low-financial-investment forms of entrepreneurship you can begin dabbling in part-time, without having to fully throw caution to the wind.
Affiliate marketing and freelance writing are both examples of jobs that you can do that require little investment of startup cash, and which allow a good deal of time flexibility.
Begin re-training
If you’re planning a fairly radical departure from your current career, you will likely need to undergo a certain amount of retraining before making the shift.
Instead of quitting your job and desperately trying to retrain and find new work before you run out of cash, consider using some of those evening and early morning hours around your day job to study.
You’re likely to find the experience far more enriching, and far less stressful, when you’re not worrying about the bills. With any luck, you’ll shortly be in a position to smoothly transition straight from your old job into a new one.
Photo by Lost Co
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